Envisioning a New Society: Prison Abolition is a Practice

Opinion

Apr 9

The United States has less than 5% of the world's population but over 20% of the world’s combined prison population. The majority of the people in American prisons are people of color. Close your eyes and imagine this with me for a moment. What if we were to live in a society that prioritizes and promotes community care through deep, structural changes in how we think about harm and safety?

We must collectively unlearn carceral solutions, which are deeply ingrained within every social institution - from education to healthcare to justice. The U.S. empire is a settler colonial state, meaning that exploitation of the land and its people is foundational to the nation. Built upon the backs of stolen people on stolen land, the Amerikan empire continues to commit great violence against communities of color and marginalized identities.

The History of Incarceration

Following emancipation and the end of the Civil War, the police played a major role in pursuing formerly enslaved Black people and convicting them on false charges such as vagrancy. In order to fulfill state quotas, law enforcement officers were encouraged to apprehend and incarcerate people, and due to the vulnerability of Black Americans in the South, it was much easier to criminalize Black behaviors and bodies in order that their labor could be exploited. During the reconstruction era, wages were low, and often police would demand that the arrestee pay a fine, or else be subject to debt peonage, which is a practice of coerced labor in which one must work in order to pay off a debt to the state.

The monetary incentive was strong here, and the local police forged deals with mining companies through convict leasing in order to both eliminate the costs of building prisons and to fund federal government services, such as railroad construction. It worked like this: police arrest poor Black people who can’t afford to pay fine; company offers to pay fine on behalf of individual, and then the arrestee must work for the company in order to pay it off. This introduction of the fee system meant that each dollar added to their fine ultimately equated additional days held in forced labor.

Although we consider the economic institution of slavery to be extinct, the reality is that the 13th amendment of the US constitution does still allow for enslavement and involuntary servitude as a punishment for “duly convicted” criminals even today. Throughout the 1970s, the US government launched its War on Drugs, which criminalizes drug use rather than viewing it in terms of inadequate healthcare. Politicians and news outlets effectively utilized law and order rhetoric in order to facilitate public paranoia around rising crime rates. With a focus on eradication and incarceration instead of rehabilitation, the era of mass incarceration began to take shape in the 1980s, during what is known as the Reagan era, when legislators and law-enforcers took a “tough on crime” approach, which expanded prisons and created longer sentences.

What is the school-to-prison pipeline?

When young students are introduced to systems of retributive justice through zero-tolerance policies, harsh disciplinary practices, and increased presence of police within schools, they are being taught that the only pathway for them is toward prison. This is known as the school-to-prison pipeline, a disproportionate practice in which disadvantaged Black and brown minors are criminalized at a young age and tried as adults rather than juveniles. This denial of youth ultimately ensures that families trapped in poverty are unable to achieve the means to escape.

Criminality is too often conflated with race due to media sensationalism resulting in the disproportionate over-policing of low socio-economic neighborhoods and communities of color. Increased surveillance does not create safety, but results in distrust, fear, and fragmented families.

The institutional racism that permeates the school-to-prison pipeline forms a self-sufficient, cyclical system that continues to devastate communities and tear families apart. In Are Prisons Obsolete, Dr. Angela Davis explains how “mass imprisonment generates profits as it devours social wealth, and thus it tends to reproduce the very conditions that lead people to prison.” The harsh reality is that the criminal punishment system is a machine that is not broken and in need of reform, but that this is exactly how the system was built to run.

“As a system of justice, [the US criminal punishment system] has its flaws. Criminal justice tends to be punitive, impersonal, and authoritarian. With its focus on guilt and blame, it discourages responsibility and empathy on the part of the offenders. The harm done by the offender is balanced by harm done to the offender. In spite of all this attention to crime, criminal justice basically leaves victims out of the picture, ignoring their needs. Retributive justice often assumes that justice and healing are separate -- even incompatible -- issues.” - Dr. Howard Zehr

This is a call for complete system upheaval.

This is a call for prison abolition and system revolution.

What is Prison Abolition?

Abolition is a movement that calls for deep structural change and the ending of unjust institutions. Rooted in the historical movement to abolish the violent institution of slavery, abolitionists today believe that incarceration in all forms harms society more than it helps. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, “prisons are catchall solutions to social problems” in the sense that they fail to address the root causes that lead people to engage in criminal acts. Often, people engage in harmful acts out of desperation, because they lack the access to adequate resources to cover their needs.

Abolition is less of an end-goal and more of a process, in which we must unlearn our tendencies toward retribution, and re-learn what it means to heal ourselves and our communities. What used to be seen as an incredibly radical vision has started to gain momentum in public discourse, especially after the national resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in the summer of 2020. We cannot fight for Black Liberation and Indigenous sovereignty without interrogating our society’s definition of justice.

“The most difficult and urgent challenge today is that of creatively exploring new terrains of justice, where the prison no longer serves as our major anchor.”- Dr. Angela Davis

In order to envision a new society, one which embraces responsibility, accountability, empathy and radical forgiveness, we must uproot and replace the current criminal punishment system with a system of restorative justice. This approach holistically implements the following steps:

Identify responsibilities: When harm is done within a community, it is necessary that the community come together as a whole to assess what must be done. This is not a one-size-fits-all approach. This requires long-term commitment and intentional relationships in order to adequately support the survivors/victims and their kin. The responsibilities vary per individual. This can be illustrated by imagining small circles that surround the survivor within a larger circle, which represents the community. Those who are closest with the survivor have the responsibility to offer support in any way they can.
Meet needs: The emotional, physical, and legal needs of the individual(s) directly impacted must be prioritized. This can be accomplished by asking and listening to what they need rather than assuming the solution can be resolved without hearing the voices of those harmed. People’s needs can change over time, and people’s attitudes toward those who harmed them can change over time. This requires patience and understanding in order to restore shalom.
Promote healing: Justice and healing go hand in hand. Returning to the image of the concentric circles, those within the community who do not have a direct relationship with the survivor and/or do have a direct relationship with the one who has done harm are responsible for engaging in conversation with them. This may include relaying what the survivor wants/needs, inviting them to undergo community accountability processes, and setting boundaries among community members.

In order to divest from viewing prisons as the sole option for ensuring justice, we must invest in communities, programs, and institutions that promote reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance.

Knowledge is Power

“Schools can be seen as the most powerful alternative to jails and prisons. Unless the current structures of violence are eliminated from schools in impoverished communities of color -- including the presence of armed security guards and police -- and unless schools become places that encourage the joy of learning, these schools will remain the major conduits to prisons. The alternative would be to transform schools into vehicles for decarceration.” - Dr. Angela Davis

Providing people with access to adequate education enables individuals to feel empowered and free to make life-affirming decisions for themselves and their loved ones.

Models We Can Look Toward

Abolition proposes a system of restorative justice modeled after Indigenous practices, such as the ancient Rwandan form of justice known as Gacaca, which is based on a foundation of truth-telling and confession. In this model of justice, healing and justice are inseparable; crime is a violation of people and relationships. The victims, offender(s), and the community work together toward solutions of reconciliation. These solutions may include: requiring offenders to return to the place of their crime and participate in community service; adequate mental health intervention & treatment; and monetary reparations.

Restorative systems still call for elements of punishment or for isolating the offender to protect others. Some crimes may be so unspeakable that they require the assailant to be cast out from the community for a set amount of time, similar to how the Ancient Greeks practiced ostracism against individuals who were perceived as a threat to the peace of the community.

Rather than viewing people who commit acts of harm as unworthy of redemption, scholar Herman Bianchi suggests that crime needs to be defined in terms of reparative law.

"[The lawbreaker] is thus no longer an evil-minded man or woman, but simply a debtor, a liable person whose human duty is to take responsibility for his or her acts, and to assume the duty of repair," he said.

What can we do today?

Contact senators and representatives, and demand from our government

The decriminalization of all drugs, decarceration of people in prison for drug charges, and expungement of their records
Access to effective, voluntary drug treatment programs as well as mental health resources around low socio-economic neighborhoods
Repurposing unused buildings as housing-first initiatives for unhoused folks